August 31 news: The first full-length drama in China produced using the full AIGC process technology, "Later Journey to the West," officially premiered today at 18:00. The Flower-Fruit Mountain arc, which meets the audience first, consists of 5 episodes, each 40 minutes long.
The series will not only be exclusively available on Mango TV but will also air on Hunan Satellite TV's prime-time drama slot at 20:00 on the premiere day, launching a synchronized TV-and-online broadcast model. The platform has also set up corresponding early access rules for viewers of different membership levels: Mango TV SVIP members can watch 3 episodes ahead, while regular VIP members can watch 2 episodes ahead.
According to the project team, this mythological seasonal drama "Later Journey to the West" is adapted from the classical神魔 (shenmo) novel of the same name written anonymously in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. The first season totals 30 episodes, each with a fixed duration of 40 minutes.
As one of the three most famous sequels to "Journey to the West," the core setting of the original novel "Later Journey to the West" is that after all beings obtained the true scriptures retrieved by Tang Sanzang and his disciples, various misinterpretations gradually arose. Characters from the next generation of the Journey to the West reunited by fate and embarked on the scripture-seeking journey once again.
This adapted series deeply integrates the forty-chapter framework of the original novel with the various foreshadowings and scattered clues embedded in the familiar main story of "Journey to the West," constructing a complete and logically self-consistent narrative system for the post-Journey era.
The story is set 1,080 years after Sun Wukong was canonized as a saint. Over the long passage of time, the content of the true scriptures retrieved back then gradually became incomplete, leading people to interpret them increasingly incorrectly. Flower-Fruit Mountain, which once gave birth to the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, has once again produced a new little stone monkey, namely Sun Xiaosheng.
The story kicks off with a highly tense conflict: the ten old monkeys from Flower-Fruit Mountain, whose names were personally crossed out of the Book of Life and Death by Sun Wukong, mysteriously vanish in public during the Immortal Saints' Celebration, plunging the entire mountain into a massive crisis of the unknown.
This series is also the first domestic production approved for simultaneous review and broadcast following the release of the NRTA's 21 relevant policies, adopting an innovative production model of simultaneous production, review, and broadcasting.
This new production model not only significantly shortens the overall cycle from creation to release for high-quality content but also allows the creative team to dynamically adjust and optimize subsequent plot details and character settings based on review feedback and real audience responses collected after broadcasting.